UW Gymnast Rearranges Priorities After World-Class Disappointments

The warning signs were there. Gymnast Michelle Campi was tired. She needed a day off. The pressure was building. She wanted a release, a break from the daily grind of the gym. She could afford to skip a day. She was in the best shape of her career, peaking for the 1994 World Championships.

But she hated her bar routine, especially a difficult move called hop-full. She was uncomfortable with it. Its difficulty was creeping into her brain.

In her gym in Sacramento, she begged Coach Rick Newman to change the routine. Newman wouldn't listen.

Uncharacteristically, Campi argued with her coach in practice, sometimes muttering about him under her breath. He wouldn't budge.

"Rick told me, `If you take the hop-full out, then you're going to admit that you were afraid and you're going to start losing other things," Campi said last week. "You're going to lose confidence. He put that into my mind. That was kind of really, really bad on his part."

The stress was wearing on Campi. The battles with her coach were making her tired.

Finally, at practice, the day before she was to leave for the world trials, Campi's hands slipped from the bar. She landed on her back, fracturing three vertebrae, dislocating another.

"I was doing a trick I wasn't even afraid of, but out of tiredness, or whatever I just peeled from the bar and did half of a flip and landed on my back," she said. "If you were watching, it wasn't a scary fall. It was just one of those falls where you knock the wind out of yourself.

"I landed and I couldn't breathe and I felt some tingling. I got up and walked around and told my coach I didn't think I broke anything.

"But my mom knew I was hurt," she said. "She was saying to me, `You're not going to go to the trials. We're going to just take a break. Don't worry.'

"But Rick was being so stubborn. He said, `Just take her home, put her in a bath. We're not going to get anything more done today, but she should be all right tomorrow.' "

About four years earlier, Campi's mother and coach had become romantically involved. The three of them were living together as a family. Campi's broken back became the beginning of the end of that complicated relationship.

"Their relationship was really hard for me at first," Campi said. "I did not like it at all. I guess I got used to it. The whole time we were all together, all our lives were consumed by gymnastics. There really wasn't much more than that."

Campi broke her back and shattered her last Olympic dream.

She had bone fusion surgery. A rod was implanted in her back and she was in a body cast for three months.

This teenage dynamo, who had devoted her life to her sport, was stuck in bed, wondering at 17, what to do with the rest of her long life.

Since that fall, she has been rearranging her priorities. She got medical permission to begin workouts again last May. She accepted a scholarship to the University of Washington and is competing for the Huskies in the balance beam.

Now 19 and a freshman, she still is sorting through everything that has happened in her career and weighing the importance of gymnastics in her future.

"I'm pretty much taking it day-to-day," Campi said. "I don't have the same devotion that I had before, for obvious reasons. Before, I thought gymnastics would always be the number one priority in my life. I mean, it was my first love.

"When I got hurt, for a while, it was like everything I had done in the sport was over. It was almost like it never happened. It was very much like the death of a part of me. I no longer had the goals or the focus or the passion that I had always had."

Campi's biography is the stuff of fiction. At a time when most people's lives are just beginning, she's already lived a full one.

At 15, she qualified for the 1992 Olympics, despite breaking her elbow two days before the trials. After the injury, she had 30 days to get back into Olympic shape. A month after her injury she passed the final trial in Orlando and made the team.

Her elbow was held together by screws, but she competed. "Mind over matter, " she said. "I blocked out the pain. I had my goal in mind."

Eventually, Campi's elbow kept her from competing. She went to Barcelona but was named as an alternate.

"Everyone's goal, when they first start in gymnastics is to go to the Olympics," Campi said. "I was there in Barcelona, but it wasn't really how I'd expected it would be. That was kind of frustrating, but at the same time it motivated me to stick with it and try again in 1996. But I guess it wasn't meant to be."

Like many young female gymnasts, she worked under the Svengali-like guidance of a coach who scheduled her life. There are scars from their relationship.

But Campi doesn't consider herself another victim of her sport. She still keeps in contact with Newman, who is coaching in Oklahoma City. And she still enjoys her afternoons in the gym.

"It's funny, I don't feel bitter towards Rick," she said. "Right after the injury I was very bitter towards him, but I know he's not a bad person. I get a little angry because he was the only person who could have gotten me to back off.

"The whole injury thing could have been avoided, but I don't dislike him in any way. I'm glad my mom's back with my father. I never thought of Rick as a father, but I think he's a decent person."

Her sport has given her opportunities few teenagers get to experience. She traveled to Japan, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Germany. She helped the United States win the silver medal in the 1991 World Championships. She was the bronze medalist in the all-around at the 1992 U.S. Championships.

"I'm still looking for the answers," Campi said. "I have every reason to feel like a victim, but I guess it's just not in my personality to dwell on it and feel really, really bitter. I won't get anything done feeling like that. What's happened has happened.

"Sure there are certain things where I don't feel like I was treated in the right way, but that's life. There's nothing I can do about it now. I can only make the best of the situations I've been put in. It's worked out that I've come here and I'm happy here. I'd always heard that college gymnastics is a lot of fun and it is.

"I'm doing a lot of things now for myself, instead of for my sport. I no longer have the pressure from my coach, or anyone. Now I'm doing what I want to do. This is a big transition, but it's definitely about time for it.

"Now I'm learning there are other ways I can make myself feel confident besides just gymnastics. There are other things I enjoy, like writing and having a social life."

Despite the turbulence Michelle Campi survived world-class gymnastics and safely arrived at the other side of her life.

She has reached a complicity with her new environment, beginning another life, experiencing, for the first time, the wonders and the freedom of youth.